Winter Chill. Jon Cleary
a skerrick, Scobie.’ He never worried about protocol, no matter who was around. ‘No prints, nothing – everything’s been wiped clean.’
‘No shoeprints? It rained last night.’
‘There’s a welter of muddy prints on the floor, you could never sort ’em out. The monorail was packed all day yesterday, I gather – all the Yank lawyers and their wives. The cleaners don’t start work on the car till five a.m. By then we’d taken over this one.’
‘How many bullets?’
‘Just the one. It’s still in the body.’ Truach stamped out the cigarette he had been smoking; he knew how much the habit annoyed Malone, a lifelong non-smoker. ‘This bloke Brame, he’s top of the ladder, they tell me.’
‘Where’s the media, then?’ said Clements, though he looked relieved that none was in sight.
‘They’ve been and gone from here. Now they’re all along at the Novotel interviewing the thousand Yank lawyers.’
‘How many?’
Truach looked at Peta Smith, who had come up behind Malone and Clements. ‘There’s a thousand of them,’ she said. ‘Spread around every hotel in Sydney. This is the first international convention that’s been in Australia and it seems everyone wanted to come. Plus their wives and girlfriends. And boyfriends, too, I guess,’ she added, and Malone wondered if there was a note of prejudice in her voice.
‘Who’s home minding the store?’
‘There are eight hundred thousand lawyers in the United States,’ said Clements, grabbing in his mental bag again. ‘I was reading the Law Society’s Journal one day. One lawyer for every three and a half thousand of the population. There’ll be enough left home to mind the store and chase ambulances.’
‘Eight hundred thousand!’ Malone shook his head. ‘We don’t have that many crims registered out here.’
The four detectives were silent a moment, aghast at the thought of the legal poison ivy spreading across the US. Malone had few prejudices, but one of them, as with most cops, was an aversion to lawyers.
He stepped past Truach into the carriage and looked around. There were three blue-upholstered seats facing three similar seats in the small compartment. There was none of the disorder one so often found at a murder scene; the compartment was neat and tidy, with none of the vandalism that occurred on the city’s urban trains.
‘When can we have the car?’ said Korda, behind him. ‘I wanna get it cleaned. We’ll need it today, all the traffic.’
‘Not today,’ said Clements. ‘Maybe tomorrow.’
The technical manager’s face closed up, but if he was annoyed he kept it to himself. ‘Well, okay, if you say so … But you know what a head office is like – at the end of the day all they’re interested in is the bottom line.’
‘You should work for the government,’ said Clements. ‘It’s even worse. They can’t find the bottom line.’
‘Let’s go along and talk to the thousand lawyers,’ said Malone. ‘If we can get one of them to confess, you can have the carriage back today.’
He and Clements went down to his car. On the opposite side of the road, atop a low cliff, was a row of warehouses, some of them now converted into apartment complexes; these had been the wool stores when wool had been the wealth of the country, but those days were gone, probably for ever.
The two detectives drove along to the hotel. It was French-owned and was one of the many-roomed hotels that had been built in the city in the past five or six years, completed just as the recession had begun and hotel rooms became as much a glut as wool and wheat. Malone gave the Commodore over to a parking valet who, though Australian, had a Frenchman’s hauteur, especially when it came to cars that should have been traded in years ago.
‘Leave it up here on the ramp,’ said Malone, showing his badge. ‘It’ll give the place some tone.’
The two men walked, or were blown, in through glass doors to the concierge’s desk; the architects, whoever they were, had not allowed for winter’s south-west winds. The concierge referred them to Reception on the first level. They travelled up on an escalator and stepped off into the big lobby, which was crowded and echoed to the clamour of voices, all of them American. They squeezed their way through the throng, asked for the manager and were directed to his office.
He was a small neat man, French and polite; the owners back in France had realized that it would be pointless sending French arrogance to handle the native barbarians. With him were two Americans, both grey-haired, both grey with concern.
‘I am Charles Champlain. This is Mr Zoehrer, vice-president of the American Bar Association, and this is Mr Novack, the American Consul-General.’
‘A terrible tragedy, terrible!’ Zoehrer was a big man with a big voice and big gestures; he flung his hands about, addressed Malone and Clements as if he were addressing a jury. ‘His wife’s due in today – God, what a way to greet her! Orville’s been murdered!’
‘She’s on her way in from the airport now.’ Novack, a short bulky man, had the calm air of a man who had, innumerable times, had to convey bad news. In a way, Malone guessed, a consul’s job was not unlike a policeman’s: you were everybody’s target. ‘Do you want me to handle it, Karl, or will you?’
‘We’d better do it together,’ said Zoehrer. ‘I’ve only met her once before, at Clinton’s inaugural. She’s not a lawyer’s wife, you know what I mean? Not one for conventions, stuff like that.’ Then he seemed to remember that he was talking in front of strangers, non-Americans. He looked at Malone. ‘You getting anywhere with your investigations, sir? Inspector, is that right?’
Malone nodded. ‘Sergeant Clements and I’ve just come on the case. Our Crime Scene team tell us they’ve come up with nothing. The only thing we can say is that it doesn’t look like a mugging, something unpremeditated. He was lured on to the monorail, or forced on, by someone who knew what they were about. Or maybe he was shot beforehand and carried on to the monorail. At this stage we don’t know. I have to ask this – would you know if Mr Brame had any enemies, someone who might’ve followed him from the United States? Was he working on some big case? I’m asking the obvious – the Mafia?’
The big hands were spread wide. ‘Not as far as I know. Orville wasn’t a criminal lawyer, at least he hadn’t been in years. We lived and worked on opposite sides of the country. He was New York, I’m San Francisco and LA. Los Angeles. I guess all lawyers – civil as well as criminal – I guess we all collect enemies as we go along.’
There was a knock on the office door and a young woman put her head in. ‘Mr Champlain, Mrs Brame has arrived. We’ve taken her up to her suite.’
‘How is she?’ asked the manager.
‘It was hard to tell. Upset, I suppose, but she seemed to be holding herself together. Someone met her at the airport and told her on the way in.’
‘Well, we better go up,’ said Novack. ‘Will you excuse us, Inspector?’
‘Mr Novack, this is a murder case, on our turf.’
‘Of course, how stupid of me. Let’s go. I just hope she can handle it, four strange men coming in on her like this.’
When the four men stepped out of the manager’s office into the lobby, a sudden silence fell on the crowd still there. The throng opened up and they went through and stepped into a waiting lift. As the doors closed they heard the clamour start up again and Malone glimpsed photographers and reporters trying to break through.
‘I hope they didn’t shut up like that when Mrs Brame came in,’ said Zoehrer.
‘They did, sir,’ said the girl who was escorting them to the upper floor. ‘It was eerie.’
‘When you go back